2025-04-24

This post mostly serves as the traditional "first post"; no blog is complete without one.

Random Life Updates

I've been rediscovering smolweb/indieweb type stuff recently. I've always kind of been interested in the more content rich side of the net but it's always been a bit fleeting.

This time around I have joined fediring.net which is kind of neat. I've been hopping around the various sites on the ring and thoroughly enjoying reading the things people write.

I have recently revived my old Thinkpad X220 (from which I am writing now). I watched a YouTube video from Action Retro on loading modern Linux on older machines and while I'm no stranger to that sort of thing in the slightest, he mentioned a distro called "MX Linux" that I had not heard of before. After doing some reading I decided to give a similar OS a try, AntiX. So far, I'm fairly impressed. It runs blazingly fast on the X220 (though, if I'm honest, I'm not sure my normal Arch setup would be all that much worse). I think what I like most about it is that they've retained the feel of "old school" Linux; back in the day before GTK3, Systemd and modern "flat" UI styling. Ther's something a bit nostalgic about it that just feels nice.

On that note, I just learned that my old friend CrunchBang Linux seems to have been revived in recent years. The project CrunchBang++ seems to have sprung up as a spiritual, if not a functional, successor to the old favorite of mine. I ran CrunchBang for years before the project shuttered and it did a fantastic job of keeping my favorite old laptop (at the time an X60) running for many many years past when most would have considered it scrap. I was always a fan of the monochrome, openbox theme they used. Even now on this laptop running AntiX I've switched over to FluxBox and set up a fairly monochrome color scheme.

My first real experience with Linux goes back to the first laptop I inherited from my dad, a Thinkpad T23 (which I still have and still runs fine, thanks for asking), running Slackware 9 and FluxBox. That probably explains a lot about why I keep coming back to these types of environments. They just fit like an old glove...